In a paroxysm of liberal lip-smacking, an internal memo from the Premiere Networks, the talk radio group that distributes Rush Limbaugh, went into viral transit yesterday, announcing that a blue chip list of big brand advertisers had asked not to be on the Limbaugh show – or, for that matter, on the shows of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

What this seemed to mean was that the American establishment itself, in the form of, among others, IBM, American Express, McDonald's and the United States Army and Postal Service, was putting its foot down about the greatest bugaboos to liberal sensibility and the nation's comity: rightwing shockjocks.

There is an argument to make here, and I wish someone would make it, about the terrible precedent of encouraging advertisers to stampede away from controversial and ornery speech. They are skittish enough, and every instance of an advertising boycott encourages them more and makes so many of us in this business – if not Rush Limbaugh – censor ourselves.

But my argument is a much different one. It is that none of this is what's happening: it's a misunderstanding of how talk radio works. Instead, this is a bunch of blue chip brands trying to codger a bit of good press without have to do anything at all. True, maybe they would do the high-minded and censorious thing if they were Rush advertisers; but, in fact, they are not (at least, not to any meaningful degree). What we have is the establishment expressing its ineffectual and opportunistic ire.

Rush exists – arguably, much of what is new and successful in the media today exists – in spite of the blue chip establishment. In a world where many people, particularly media people (and, I'll bet, particularly liberal media people), find it hard not to use the word "brand" in every sentence they utter, the media revolution has largely happened without the involvement of big brands.

This is an important fact about the future of the media business, and also about the fractiousness of the American conversation. The unbranded revolution is the hidden subtext of so much of the unruly and perverse character of public life – that is, media life.

In the 1950s and 60s, my dad ran a small advertising agency, which, while it would have loved to have had big brand name clients (he spent most of his time chasing the big names), had to exist on that much larger part of the US economy: the no-brand companies that flourished not because you thought well of them, but because you bought something from them. This was called direct selling: not creating desire, not building the allure of the product; just getting you into the store.

Radio worked very well for this. It was local – as much of the no-brand economy was, and continues to be. Repetition made you remember the contact info (hence the jingle). And it was cheap. My dad, even as he chased the big brands, became something of a savant at selling the no-brands through the remarkably cheesy medium of radio. As it happened, in 1987, one of the guys my dad worked with, Lee Vanden-Handel, a man without any rabid interest in politics but with a keen sense of the no-brand advertising market, discovered Rush Limbaugh at a station in Sacramento. The rest is history.

While big media, the mighty TV networks and super conglomerates, seemed to be conquering the world, the no-brand movement – by targeting its ads at specific and dedicated audiences – financed the sub-rosa growth of a much more personal media, including rightwing radio. After re-making, and saving, radio, no-brand advertising went on to create the cable business, via the infomercial, and then Google and the web, though search engine advertising. These are all mediums that, like talk radio, grew on the basis of lead-generation advertising: that is, getting someone to be in direct contact with you, through 800-numbers or click through.

Along the way, media styles bifurcated. There was big, established, remote and, arguably, homogenized and anodyne, superstar media – including the liberal media. And then, there was marginal, bargain-basement, attention-getting, unregulated, often loopy media: talkers, Fox, much of the web. The latter seemed to touched a hotter nerve than the former.

And the business bifurcated, too: big brands continued to cling to the safe world of network television; the no-brands bought cheap time with distinctive voices and passionate audiences.

This is partly to say that the media establishment really has no power over Rush, and that his advertisers will all be back very soon because few of them, being no-brands, really have any reputation to lose. And this is partly to say that there probably is no end in sight for fractiousness and polarizing speech because lead-gen advertisers don't really care about respectability. In a be-careful-what-you-wish-for world, liberals, who used to decry the heavy hand of big advertisers, have lived to see the day of the we-don't-care-what-you-say little advertiser.

And it is partly to say that liberals, to their continuing detriment, really don't understand how the media work.

The conservatives are quite right to characterize the liberal elite in terms of media and Hollywood. That is, old media. The conservatives, excluded from liberal hegemony, were forced to find a new voice and a new business model – one which, arguably, changed the culture. While this was going on, the liberals, pleasing the likes of IBM and American Express, arguably lost their voice.

Curiously, Rush, unfettered by those sorts of restraints, has, along with much of the Republican party, become ever stranger. With the effect of making the white-bread liberals look ever so much like the prudent establishment, for better or for worse.Of course, the media world fractures into ever smaller segments. Which means that Rush himself is a kind of hoary old model, as no-brands move ever further from the media we once knew and closer to the point of sale – to that thing in your hand, the instantly-gratifying phone.Whether this is good for anybody – other than the no-branders – we do not know.